GoodFriday: On lessons to my son, the dearth of attention, & NEW AI find
Happy GoodFriday!
Here’s something I heard, thought, and did this week.
Something I Heard: The Dearth of Attention
A client of mine sent me an opinion piece from The New York Times written by Zeynep Tufekci. There was a particular excerpt from the article that stood out to him and also resonated with me. Here it is:
“In 1971, Herbert Simon — recipient of both the Nobel Prize in economics and its Computer Science equivalent, the Turing Award — provided one of the greatest insights about what happens when technology switches us from a regime of scarcity to one of glut, as it has so many times throughout history. Discussing the new abundance of information that printing, mass media and computers begat, he noted that “wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes.” He was referring to attention, now the most precious commodity of all.”
New forms of technology may be free or extremely cheap, but the greatest price we pay for access is our attention.
Something I Thought: The Art of Becoming
As a father of an almost 14-year-old son, one of the most important lessons I want to pass down to him is the art of becoming.
The art of becoming begins with setting your sights on something beyond your current abilities, something that feels just out of reach, and committing to the pursuit. The goal itself matters, but the real transformation happens in the process of chasing it.
In that pursuit, you grow. You become the type of person who’s willing to sacrifice comfort for progress. You develop discipline when the excitement fades. You make mistakes, you stumble, and then you choose to get back up, learning something each time.
These experiences shape more than just your skills; they shape your character. They teach patience, perseverance, and humility. They build a quiet confidence that comes from knowing you can take on hard things and emerge stronger.
The art of becoming isn’t about arriving at some final, fixed version of yourself. It’s about continuously evolving into someone more capable, resilient, and wise— someone who can meet life’s challenges head-on.
That’s the lesson I want my son to carry into adulthood: aim higher than you think you can reach, and let the climb make you who you’re meant to be.
Something I’m Doing: New AI Find I’m Excited About
I know it probably seems like I talk about AI a lot, but I’m genuinely excited about this new frontier and what it means for us in the next stage of human development. And this latest thing I tried with ChatGPT is just awesome!
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been tracking my sleep with the WHOOP Band. It’s given me a ton of data—things like sleep stages, heart rate variability (HRV), resting heart rate, and recovery scores. All this information is great but here’s the thing: data without context is just noise.
That’s where ChatGPT has been a game changer.
Instead of trying to interpret all those numbers on my own, I’ve been taking screenshots of my data and feeding it into Chat in order to get a better understanding of how to improve my sleep quality. Along with the screenshots I’ll ask it:
How do I improve my HRV?
How do my training loads affect my deep sleep?
What patterns show up on days I recover the best?
With AI’s ability to analyze trends and connect dots, I’ve been able to uncover things I would’ve missed, like how the strain from my normal workday may impact my HRV, or how I may need to incorporate a down-regulating sequence after my workouts to help me better regulate parasympathetic tone.
The best part of using ChatGPT to interpret my data is taking that insight and turn it into action. AI doesn’t just tell me what happened—it helps me figure out what to change so the next night is better than the last.
In a world overflowing with data, the real value comes from interpretation. That’s where human intuition and AI analysis work best together. The tech points out the patterns; I decide how to act on them.
Since I’ve implemented some of the strategies that the AI has recommended i’ve seen steady improvements in my recovery scores over the last few days.
It’s awesome to see how this tech can be used to make improvements in one of the most vital parts of life.
Until next week!
-Cameron Harn
